Original work by Rodolfo Zito in good condition, signed by the artist. >> Note: for shipping requests please contact in private. (Molochio, 12 April 1924 – Rome, 4 December 1995) Rodolfo Zito was born Molochio, in the province of Reggio Calabria, in the deep south of Italy, on 12 April 1924. He was a world-renowned Italian painter, sculptor and poet, considered one of the masters of twentieth century painting. After having immortalized his art, making frescoes for numerous cathedrals for thirty years, in 1972 exhibited for the first time in Rome, receiving wide public and critical acclaim. On the wings of success he exhibited in every part of the world, wherever he is called to represent Italian art, collecting official prizes and coveted awards. His works, with a recognized commercial value in continuous and constant ascent, can be found in collections and museums all over the world. He died in Rome on December 4, 1995. This biography stems from the desire to pay homage and, consequently, to place a man and his art in their right dimension, through his tireless artistic wanderings. Painter, Sculptor, Poet who, through his "Magna Opera", has exalted the principle of Universal Aesthetics, with a neoclassical vision as a modern expression of an ancient post-Renaissance cultural tradition, as opposed to a contemporary tendency of clear rejection of a classic past, definitely unattainable, therefore too uncomfortable to inherit. Zito is the eldest son Pasquale Zito and Caterina Zito. His father, Pasquale, was a fervent Catholic monarchist, awarded the "Knight of Vittorio Veneto" by “his King" (as he used to call him), he had fought in all the wars that had been going on through the first part of his life: for his country and always on the side of Savoy. Authoritarian, as only a soldier could be, cultured much above the average in an Italy and, above all, in the South where illiteracy was a widespread plague. A young man who studied meant two arms taken away from work. He was also an agent of an insurance company, the Lloyd of Trieste, one of the most important at that time, which allowed him to demonstrate his sense of love for others, helping hundreds and maybe thousands of people to complete all the formalities, a titanic enterprise at the time when the rate of illiteracy was very high, and allow them to leave their homeland to go everywhere in the world, looking and hoping to find a job and give a future to themselves and their families. Often personally vouching with his word for people that had nothing about their origin, their culture and even their honour even when their criminal record was not so very immaculate: Pasquale Zito was also this, a strict man with a huge heart. Young Zito shows from an early age the first signs that will prophesy his future link with art. Restless little boy, he never completed the secondary courses of secondary schools, leaving the institute in the first year of studies, rather than the school and its claustrophobic classrooms he preferred the outdoors, the freedom to decide his days in the fields, on his mountain, always looking for novelties that can intrigue his desire to know and to learn. Consequently, what better way to capture those moments than to immortalise them on accidental sheets or on pieces of board made from old furniture? Unconscious imitator of a great painter of the past, Giotto, like him he portrays pastoral scenes, wild animals that accompany him in his daily raids. Memories jealously kept by his family first, and then by his children. Despite his young age, he already showed a passion for art and showed a strong talent for drawing, an element that did not escape Maestro Antonio Cannata, his countryman, who took him as his pupil in his workshop and gave him the formal foundations of figurative art, such as drawing and oil painting, but also rudimentary lessons on the centuries-old technique of the "fresco". A precious experience that will give him, in his future life as a traveling artist, the possibility to fresco more than thirty churches; small and large masterpieces that will allow him to travel and perfect his artistic experience. But the workshop of his teacher is only one step, and the same need, the same anxiety pushed him to seek wider horizons and to live new knowledge. The young artist feels ready for the big jump: Rome! Where, however, he arrived for another reason, military service. Italy is at war, Rome is occupied by the Germans, hard times for the Roman population and he is not excluded. In the midst of so much darkness, a ray of sunlight breaks through the darkness of war and hits him in full, in fact, a few steps from his barracks he met what will be the woman of his life, his future wife, Luisa called "Visia". The transition from an "obscure" village of the deep south of Italy at war to a city, Rome, full of people, that from the immediate post-war period has turned into a new "ville lumière" was, certainly, an important experience in the formation of the personality of the painter who, initially rather dazed, ended up in a voluntary exile from his "beloved art". Comic strip designer at the "Vittorioso" and satirist cartoonist at the "Marc 'Aurelio", which has given glory to so many other illustrious figures, are his first Roman stages, then the ecclesiastical phase and, here below, an anecdote that he used to tell: "It was the Holy Year of 1950, Rome was invaded by tourists and, above all, pilgrims, at night I drew Madonnas and Saints on the sidewalks of some Roman squares, in the morning, while I went to sleep, some friends took my place and, pretending to be the artist, they would "dirty the sky" and, during the day, they collected the fruits (small donations from tourists, pilgrims or not, entranced by "our" little masterpieces . In the evening we gathered to divide the proceeds in strictly equal parts”. And it was precisely in one of those squares, the most important one, the most famous one in the world, Piazza San Pietro that one day, one of his friends confessed to an ecclesiastic, a high prelate,that the author of that drawing was not him but his dear friend Rodolfo. That Monsignore loved that story and, even more, he liked that artistic hand. After that episode, some drawings on the Passion of Christ were commissioned and well remunerated, plates designed to illustrate some religious texts. We are in the immediate post-war period, Italy is rebuilding itself, in the dreams and hopes of the Italians; Rodolfo Zito, in his time as a poster man (paid by of the most important names of the Roman trade and not only, among others "Le Sorelle Adamoli"), tells part of those dreams and those hopes by illustrating billboards that will decorate, for a long time, the streets of the capital and the province. But all this is not enough, he feels that the road ahead is still long, that there is still so much to do, to learn, to know. So he resumed his wandering journey, this time around the world, in the constant search for new messages, which seem to come from the past, from the great Masters, through their works of art scattered in museums and art galleries across the world, with stubborn insistence and commendable devotion. The introverted, Mediterranean character, does not allow him to link his name to particular currents, much less political, that were so fashionable in the 50s and 60s and 70s of the twentieth century. An artistic world, pseudo intellectual, which replaces classic forms with reason, psyche, words and concepts. Rodolfo Zito flees from all this, perhaps thinking not to be ready for those speeches, he who, self-taught, had the opportunity to know only the art of visual, plastic forms, of Michelangelo's masses, the caravaggesque darkness, the art of his fathers. So he decides not to be part of this artistic world that goes hand in hand with a technology that is alien to him, so he isolates himself again, only with his art. Art to which he sacrifices every space of his existence, including what is closest to his heart, his family, his children. In the mid-1960s, an assiduous collaboration with the antique dealers in via dei Coronari, in Rome, who commissioned him canvases and plates with eighteenth-century subjects, which he signed under the pseudonym "Sittis" and that many of them, cleverly, will pass for good originals of that period. Yes, because this "young artist" is a painter who came from another era, from the past, who paints like it used to be done, using the same techniques, the same materials, who thinks and creates like them, in a few words: one of them! Only at the age of fifty, at the insistence of a fraternal friend who, understanding his potential and his enormous artistic talent, decides to take the big step. He then decided to exhibit for the first time with his work, with his real name: Rodolfo Zito, "R. Zito" on the canvases. Together with the immediate success of the public, the critics have spent rivers of words and praise for this "new artist". Enthusiastic words that accompanied him on the second journey of his artistic life. And if it is true that some criticism could be biased, with Rodolfo Zito it did not happen, because even if some critics were paid, their interventions, their contributions, have been sincerely helped by the fact that they were in front of a great artist, a great master. There was nothing to invent, their few words were only to support what Rodolfo Zito showed, what he expressed on the canvas, a simple painting, earthly and easy to interpret; a painting linked to the most classic traditions, a painting that does not hide intrinsic concepts, a painting that shows, through its shapes and colours, all the power and all the rage of a man, of Mediterranean lineage, who wants to tell the "Tragedy of Man".